End-user design of emotion-adaptive dialogue strategies for therapeutic purposes

Abstract

Two fundamental nontechnical research questions related to the development of emotion-aware dialogue systems are how to identify different kinds of emotional reactions that can be expected to occur in a given interaction domain, and how the system should react to the emotional user behavior. These questions are especially important for dialogue systems used in medical treatment of children with developmental disorders. The paper reports on an adaptive dialogue system that allows the therapist to flexibly design and test dialogue strategies. Our aim was to achieve a balance between the ease-of-use of the system by nontechnical users and the flexibility to adapt the system to different therapeutic settings. The system builds on our previous work, and its functionality is explained by means of example. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.